An Interview with Historian Walter Laqueur on the Arab Spring

RUBIN: To move on to more recent events: Why the pessimism concerning the chances of the Arab spring — in Egypt and elsewhere?

Laqueur: My evaluation had more to do with my experience as historian of revolutions than the Middle East. (I was the author of the entry “revolution” in the penultimate edition of the Encyclopedia of Social Sciences.) Talking about a “stolen revolution” is a bit of a joke for there had been no revolution in any of these countries, merely the deposition of unloved authoritarian rulers who had outstayed their welcome. The secular revolutionaries were relatively few and split the extreme left. Various Trotskyite sects endorsed the Muslim Brotherhood which, after all, was an anti-imperialist movement. The power of the traditional structures and ideologies was greatly underrated.

All the attention was focused on Midan el Tahrir. I don’t think any of the foreign observers went to Mahalla al Kubra, or Kubra al Kheima, or Cairo’s megaslum, Manshiet Nasser (also known as Rubbish City), home to a million unfortunate people, or the many other places where the great majority of Egyptians live. Nor did they pay attention to the fact that a great many people had benefited from the Mubarak regime, millions of state employees — but this is a different story.

Rubin: The U.S. government obviously prefers the Muslim Brotherhood to the SCAF — the generals. why?

Laqueur: Who knows? I do not understand the cogent need to choose between two anti-democratic forces. Perhaps they know something we don’t. Perhaps they think the Brotherhood will eventually prevail and will feel gratitude towards Washington. Perhaps they believe the Ikhwan have changed their character and will become even more moderate when in power.

Rubin: There is obviously a great deal of ferment in Egypt — the young people relatively qualified who cannot find jobs commensurate with their training and expectations. In what direction will they turn?

Laqueur: It is a real tragedy. Egypt is a very poor country as far as natural resources are concerned. The Brotherhood has neither a vision nor a program except “Islam is the answer.” The situation has greatly deteriorated since the outbreak of the Arab spring and the number of unemployed has risen. There has been a flight of capital from Egypt, tourism has greatly declined. The Egyptian pound has lost its value, inflation has risen significantly. I do not know how much money the government has for the import of essential foods. It cannot be more than a few months (three months according to government spokesmen). Unless Egypt gets a handout of a few billion dollars immediately, there will be starvation. Can a disaster be averted? I doubt it. It may coincide with a similar breakdown in Sudan. Help from the oil-rich Arab countries? This would be a real sensation.

Rubin: In view of all this, how to explain the great optimism of the Western media beginning with the Arab spring in January 2011 concerning the prospects of the democratic-revolutionary movement — the dawn of a new glorious age?

Laqueur: I wish I had an answer. To read now the comments of the correspondents of the New York Times reminds one of Alice in Wonderland. They were so utterly mistaken. It is probably unfair to single out one specific newspaper because the illusions were so widely shared even by the experts. In part, the roots of the misunderstandings were, of course, psychological. For so long, reports from the Middle East had been negative and depressing: autocratic governments, riots, terrorism, corruption, civil wars, and so on. And now suddenly, there was this great, intoxicating promise of freedom and progress — a beacon of light to the whole world….

There was a total misreading of the Egyptian situation and the prospect and the reasons should be examined very,very carefully.

16 Comments, 13 Threads

1.
Menachem Ben Yakov

” … how to explain the great optimism of the Western media beginning with the Arab spring in January 2011 concerning the prospects of the democratic-revolutionary movement …? ‘

I think the answer is less political than it is sociological. We have raised a generation that is consumed with self image above all else. Either something conforms to ones wishes and world view or it is simply ignored and dismissed as irrelevant.
The western media simply chose to presume the values it wished the ” Arab Spring ” to have were the values it did have. Journalists raped? An aberration to be briefly discussed and dismissed. Anti-semitic banners at Tahrir Square? Simply ignore and not report.
Why is ” thirty the new twenty “?
Not because of better health but because of a juvenile mindset that lingers until disaster catches up.
Obama, is the best example. Why should his policies work? Because he wants them to.
When they don’t work? Blame someone else and go play golf.

How funny to see your post. Two days ago I went thru old boxes looking for some old documents I need and I stumbled upon the same book! I bouught it at a book sale 5 years ago, and now I have the time to read it. I never knew BR edited it!

The MB is alienating the Gulf states, a huge source of potential money and one wonders if Saudi Arabia doesn’t actually fear the MB. Morsi is pushing Egypt into a crisis far too early right now. Today the MB is bucking both the weakened Supreme Court and the army in what will be a confrontation for power. MB has the numbers to fill Tahrir Square but not without bringing in outside numbers and so cannot sustain a protest in the street. The MB is nevertheless calling for Tahrir to fill with MB supporters today and hoping the army will be cowed. The MB risks everything by pushing too hard too soon.

Mubarak wasn’t deposed primarily for either corruption or just being around too long. He was tried in the court of the “Arab street”, and convicted, of a great crime in modern Islamic culture. Namely, being insufficiently Islamic.

That is, he was neither rabidly anti-Western, nor did he daydream and rant about “driving the Jews into the sea” every five minutes during the day. Not that he was a particular friend of the West or Israel; he simply was not hostile enough to suit the Islamist movement types.

In the Islamic world today, that is practically grounds for summary execution.

Dr. Laqueur is quite correct in saying that corrupt rulers are the rule rather than the exception in Islam, and that most such are careful to pander to the radical Islamists. Mubarak did it too, but he just didn’t do it enough to placate the radicals. Which, like it or not, is exactly who the Muslim Brotherhood are.

The Islamic world has an endemic problem, called cultural failure. Its people see themselves falling behind practically every other culture on Earth, in all areas. (Only some of the more backward tribal cultures in the Third World do worse.)

Being a tribalist culture combined with theocracy, Islam is very good at quashing innovation; declaring any new idea haraam generally is enough to get its originator killed almost instantly. It is also good at blaming everyone outside of the Umah for all its problems. And the solution to same is always the same; destroy that which is not of the Umah, conquer and rule.

It’s an easy sell when your people are conditioned from birth to believe whatever they are told by the ruling class, namely the religious leaders. Dictators, like Mubarak, are little more than the water-carriers for same; Mubarak’s problem was that he didn’t realize it until it was too late. Unlike, say, Ahmadinejad in Iran or Musharraf in Pakistan.

The separation of church and state is a principle beloved of our “enlightened elite’”, mainly because they have never wanted any church competing with them for temporal power. But the problem with it is that our “thought leaders” are so used to thinking in the terms of church being separate from, and ideally subordinate to, the secular order (i.e., themselves), that they are literally incapable of understanding a theocratic state, comprehending how it works, or indeed even recognizing one when they see it.

(Their definition of a “theocracy”? American Christians who oppose having their tax money used to support abortion. No, that’s not even close to the same thing.)

As for why the progressives here in the West are so busy swooning over the Arab Spring even now, it’s quite simple. If a “social movement” is perceivably primitive and anti-Western, it’s pristine in their eyes. While our liberal manques’ wouldn’t recognize a genuine theocracy if it bit them on the ass, I suspect they understand the Muslim Brotherhood’s politics better than Dr. Laqueur thinks.

What is missing from his analysis is a proper understanding of the motivations of the Western “intellectuals”, which are not nearly as benign as he seems to think.

That is not why Mubarak was taken down. No one was chanting you aren’t Islamic enough. Islamists were not at the forefront of the revolution. There were a fair amount of signs with the Star of David and Mubarak later on but this was at it’s heart a secular and civil revolution. Even now, half the voters voted for a Mubarak man. Morsi won a very close vote and many chose him because they chose the lesser of two evils and wouldn’t go for a Mubarak man. That does not indicate a fanatically Muslim country. In that case Morsi would’ve won handily. Don’t underestimate how much the Islamists have traction just because they are something different from Mubarak, a change, and not because they are Islamists.

“In view of all this, how to explain the great optimism of the Western media beginning with the Arab spring in January 2011 concerning the prospects of the democratic-revolutionary movement — the dawn of a new glorious age?”

The answer is depressingly simple and obvious; the ‘revolutions’ fall into their cozy memetic set of the oppressed native people throwing off the yolk of the evil autocrats and their Colonial paymasters. Same as to why they support the Brotherhood over SCAF. SCAF = Generals = Evil Fascists.

Perhaps Laqueur did indeed overestimate the success of Communism in the Middle East. However, nobody predicted the extent to which Marxists and their allies would embrace Islam. Marxists support Islamists (or are silent) on such amazing issues as women’s rights. Nothing matters to them but being anti-Israel.
However, Cuba may possibly be changing.

The concept of the “arab spring” was pushed on us by the Hilary Clinton State Department. Clinton is one of the leading Islamist in the world and has allied herself with the Moslem Brotherhood; her leading advisers in the state department are moslems. She was the big cheerleader for the intervention in Serbia which served to support the Islamic takeover of Kosovo. Remember the phony “million graves theory” which she and her allies pushed in the 90s. There was no such thing as a million moslem graves in Serbia; rather more of thousands of graves of the various ethnic groups who were waging civil war in the former communist state. Also her “husband” is on the payroll of Dubai and other gulf states who pour money into the Clinton family treasury.

Clizbe made the analogy between the Egyptian mutiny and the Russian mutiny of 1917. The parallels are striking. And today’s events continue to play out according to his analysis.

The key in understanding what we are seeing today in Egypt (and Libya) is to remember that both the Bolsheviks and the Muslim Brotherhood spent decades as illegal organizations. This is the key to their later success. Due to their experience working “illegally,” that is covertly, these parties are able to subvert their opponents, even while appearing to work above board.

Nothing they say can be believed. All is a lie and subterfuge. Don’t listen to what they say, just understand their philosophy and their ultimate goals.

Now, understanding their goal, and the fact that they are skilled in covert actions, the parallels should be clear.

Steps in the process:

1. The Bolsheviks took part in the initial overthrow of the tsar, as part of a coalition.
2. They participated in an election.
3. And then they quickly conducted a coup, which led to several years of bloody civil war.

The Muslim Brotherhood’s process has just passed step 2. They are quickly arriving at Step 3. It is inevitable. The only difference may be that the Egyptian civil war might be less protracted.

Today’s “Egypt Independent” is reporting the draft of an Article 1 and 2 of Egypt consitution.

draft of Article 1 states: “The Arab Republic of Egypt is democratic( which in , consultative, constitutional, and modernized; based on separation of powers and principal of citizenship, it is part of the Arabic and Islamic nation and tied to the African continent.”

draft of Article 2 states: “Islam is the religion of the state, and Arabic is its official language, and the principles of Islamic Sharia are the main source for legislation. Christians and Jews shall resort to legislation derived from their own religions.”

I don’t know, but it seems to me that this constitutional articles go back in time. Not only they name Egypt Islamic country (discounting Copts and others living in Egypt), but they also change status of unbelievers making them subject to their own religious laws when they need to decide matters in their own community and subject to Islamic laws when the problem(s) concern Muslims and non-Muslims.

I think that Article 2 divide Egypt into 2 (or more) religious communities with their own laws making Egypt undemocratic country because the laws will not be equal for everybody.

Over the years Walter Lacquer probably has been taken to task by many in the pursuit of understanding history. The suggestion by Cassandra’s Echo that Lacquer’s lifetime of research and reading is insufficiently broad and that he is merely echoing a piece that draws an analogy between the Egyptian mutiny and the Russian mutiny of 1917 illustrates the sometimes unfortunate qualitative difference between a historian and an intelligence professional.